One morning my then 4-year-old daughter, we’ll call her Bee, asked me “What are the rules of the family?” Kids have a way of asking you deep questions when you are least prepared. My quick answer was:
Stick together
Love each other
Have fun
These were all things she could understand given her limited scope of experiences and frame of referen...

The Labor Department's release of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTs) report this morning is further confirmation of a strong labor market. The NFIB Small Business Optimism report I highlighted earlier today also noted the difficulty small business are having in filling open job positions. The JOLTs report continues to show the number of job openings exceeding the number of unemployed indi...

The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) reported that August's Small Business Optimism Index set a new record high at 108.8. The prior high mark for the index was set 45-years ago (July 1983) when the index reached 108. NFIB's President & CEO, Juanita Duggan, stated in the report,"Today’s groundbreaking numbers are demonstrative of what I’m hearing everyday from small business own...

Utilizing sentiment measures in one's analysis is not an exact science. On the other hand, at their extremes, these sentiment measures do provide signals of a potential near term change in market and economic direction. A number of 'investor sentiment' measures are available to evaluate, but I am highlighting only two below, the NAAIM Exposure Index and the American Association of Individual Inve...

There are a few events in investing that have a high likelihood of being good predictors of the equity market's future direction, like, stock prices follow earnings, market breadth leads price, or an inverted yield curve leads economic weakness. One factor I believe the bears have missed in the recent market advance seems to be their discounting of the increasing strength of corporate earnings gro...

I have been a bit lax in writing blog posts as client and investment responsibilities have taken precedence. On a day like today though, I feel compelled to type out a blog post recognizing today's record breaking bull market, or is it?For those believing today is a record breaking one, March 9, 2009 was the start of the current bull market; therefore, today represents the 3,453 day of the advance...

As I review and highlight business and consumer optimism, I feel as though my thoughts are a bit like a broken record that plays the same song over and over again. With that, another business optimism survey is highly positive. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) reported that small business optimism rose to the second highest level in the indexes history. The optimism index lev...

About a year ago I provided an update on the Korea Stock Exchange Index (KOSPI) and the fact it can serve as a leading indicator to U.S. equity market performance. As noted in that earlier post, I referenced noted economist, Ed Hyman of Evercore ISI, who believes the KOSPI index is a leading indicator of the global economy as South Korea's exports account for over 40% of the country's gross domest...

Many of the consumer and business sentiment surveys continue to be reported at or near record levels. I highlighted a few of these high level optimism surveys last month in a post titled, Sentiment Is Widely Positive. Earlier this week Gallup released the results of the quarterly Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index and Gallup noted, "small business owners are more optimistic than at any point ...

Keeping in mind sentiment data is contrarian in nature and most predictive at its extremes, today's American Association of Individual Investors Sentiment Survey report shows bullish sentiment increased over seven percentage points to 36.36%. The plus and minus one standard deviation levels for the bullishness reading are 48% and 28%, respectively. Although the bullishness reading jumped higher in...